Hillary Clinton spoke harshly of President Donald Trump's administration and of the conservative news media in front of a sold-out crowd of thousands of women on Tuesday.
At the 2017 Professional BusinessWomen of California Conference in San Francisco, Clinton took the stage as the closing keynote speaker to raise awareness on issues surrounding gender inequality.
Clinton talked for nearly an hour on recent scandals in Silicon Valley and made mention of the multiple controversies roiling the White House.
"Just look at all that's happened in the last few days to women who were simply doing their jobs," Clinton said. "April Ryan, a respected journalist with unrivaled integrity, was doing her job just this afternoon in the White House press room when she was patronized and cut off trying to ask a question," Clinton said, referring to an exchange between Ryan and the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, on Tuesday morning.
"One of your own, California congresswoman Maxine Waters, was taunted with a racist joke about her hair," Clinton said, referring to comments by Fox News host Bill O'Reilly's on a Fox News program on Tuesday.
During the show, O'Reilly was asked about his thoughts on Waters' speech on race and Trump on the House floor on Monday. "I didn't hear a word she said," O'Reilly recalled, laughing. "I was looking at the James Brown wig."
O'Reilly has since apologized for those remarks.
Clinton then tore into what she described as a lack of diversity in the Trump administration.
"Recently, photos have been making the rounds on social media, showing groups of men in Washington making decisions about women's health," Clinton said. She later added: "to strip away coverage for pregnancy and maternity care, or limit access on reproductive healthcare around the globe. We shake our heads and think, 'How could they have not invited any women to the table?'"
She also took advantage of the recent failure of the GOP's plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the healthcare law better known as Obamacare. "When Congress and the administration tried to jam through a bill that would've kicked 24 million off their health insurance ... they were met with a wave of resistance," she said amid a round of applause. "And when this disastrous bill failed, it was a victory for all Americans."
The 2016 Democratic presidential nominee and former secretary of state closed her remarks with perhaps her most politically charged statements since the election.
"There's a little mantra I've been repeating to myself lately ... The kind of thing that pops into your head when you take a lot of long walks in the woods," she said. "But as I think about the outpouring of activism we're seeing — despite all the noise and the nonsense — four words keep coming back to me: resist, insist, persist, enlist." Clinton then outlined a kind of blueprint for supporters to ready themselves for the 2018 midterm US elections (Clinton's own political future remains unclear).
"I'm fighting for a fairer, bighearted, inclusive America," she said, later finishing by saying: "I'll be right there with you every step of the way."
